Chef Tyler Florence's recipe for success

The celebrity chef blew into town last week for a few days and managed to cook at two charity fundraisers, make four media appearances and attend two book signings.

His second cookbook, "Eat This Book: Cooking with Global Fresh Flavors," is hot off the presses; his first, the 2003 "Tyler Florence's Real Kitchen: An Indispensable Guide for Anyone Who Likes to Cook," is still in print. And he's working on his third, tentatively titled "Ty Food," due in time for Christmas 2006.

Florence's three shows still air on the Food Network: the original, "Food 911"; "Tyler's Ultimate"; and "How to Boil Water." In September, he's scheduled to begin production on a fourth, also called "Ty Food," to be shot in Florence's Manhattan apartment; it will air in January.

Florence also has announced that he has an animated TV show for kids in mind and is developing a line of products called ... Ty Food!

Whew. How does the 34-year-old do it?

"I've got a great team around me," Florence said. "It's amazing what you can do when all you have to do is leave one place and go directly to another, because someone else has set up everything for you."

What drives him, he said, is the ability to change the way people think about food.

"When I was fresh out of culinary school, I wanted to go to New York City and turn the town on its ear," he said. "But even in a very important recipe, you can only touch a couple hundred people a night, max. With the Food Network, the books, I can reach 750,000 people a day."